Revolutionaries

There is a thing that everyone wants, a thing we are desperate to get and terrified to lose.

You can’t buy it in a shop. You can’t order it online. It doesn’t grow in fields or on trees. It isn’t traded on the stock markets. But you can give it to other people, and other people can give it to you. Everyone can make more of (though many of us have not yet learned to control this power). It doesn’t run out like oil, and it doesn’t dry up and blow away like arable farmland. There is no limit to how much of it there can be in the world, and yet no-one ever seems to have enough.

For revolutionaries, this changes everything.

2.

Fairness. Justice. Democracy. Equality.

All these words imply that there’s a limited amount of some good thing, so it should be shared out equally.

That’s what revolutionaries want. Most people have less than our fair share. We should take it from the few, and share it equally among us all.

That’s what revolutionaries have always wanted. That’s what revolutionaries do. But that only makes sense if there’s a fixed amount, a limited amount, to go around.

What should revolutionaries do when the good thing is not limited?

– We should learn to make as much of it as possible.
– We should learn to share what we make as equally as possible.
– We should teach others to make as much of it as possible.
– We should teach others to share what they made as equally as possible.

3.

How can fixed things and unlimited things be compared to each-other and ranked in order of importance?

… Is the wrong question.

You only need to rank things if you have to choose between them. You only have to choose if there’s a limit.

Revolutionaries shouldn’t pick and choose. “Let’s have this good thing, but not that one.” Revolutionaries want it all.